Nina has played the role of Mia Jones, the single teenage mother on Degrassi: The Next Generation, from the shows sixth to ninth season, she currently stars as Elena Gilbert in the TV series The Vampire Diaries.
Early life
Dobrev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and moved to Canada at the age of two, where she was raised in Toronto, Ontario. Her mother is an artist while her father is a computer specialist. She has one older brother, Aleksander, who is studying to become an engineer. She attended J. B. Tyrrell Sr. Public School and Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, Ontario. From a very young age, she showed great enthusiasm and talent for the arts—dance, gymnastics, theater, music, visual arts, and acting. Dobrev attended the Dean Armstrong Acting school where she was discovered by many different talent agencies in Toronto.
Career
Modelling jobs led to commercials, which then turned into film auditions. Shortly thereafter, she booked roles in feature films, including Fugitive Pieces, Away from Her, Never Cry Werewolf, and the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation. She also was in an MTV movie called The American Mall on CTV. She is currently starring in The CW's drama The Vampire Diaries, playing the dual role of Elena Gilbert, a human who is caught between two vampire brothers, and Elena's doppelgänger Katherine Pierce, a vampire that the same brothers each loved while they were still human during the American Civil War.
She also had a bit role in the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film grossed $3 million in the United States theatrically and became one of the higher-grossing speciality films in the United States in 2010, (according to Variety, "$3 million is the new $10 million" for speciality films' box office in 2010).
Personal life
Dobrev attended Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Toronto until her graduating year. She entered secondary studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, majoring in sociology, before dropping out in 2008 to pursue her acting career.
